—The U.S. military struck a Syrian airfield near Homs, the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s response to this week’s chemical-weapons attack by the Assad regime. More here
—Republicans changed the rules of the Senate on judicial nominations, invoking the so-called “nuclear option” to lower the threshold for such votes from a supermajority of 60 to a simple majority of 51. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
UPDATE: Republicans Use 'Nuclear Option' After Democrats Filibuster Gorsuch Nomination
Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch testifies during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on March 22, 2017. (Jim Bourg / Reuters)
Updated at 1:08 p.m.
Republicans changed the rules of the Senate on judicial nominations, invoking the so-called “nuclear option” to lower the threshold for such votes from a supermajority of 60 to a simple majority of 51. The change came after Democrats filibustered the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court seat made vacant by the death last year of Justice Antonin Scalia. Republicans, who have a 52-48 majority in the Senate, had the support of at least three Democratic senators, but fell short of the 60 votes needed to overcome the Democratic filibuster. The party-line vote on the rule change was 52-48. Democrats, still smarting over the GOP’s refusal to hold hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the same Supreme Court seat, have been unrelenting in their opposition of Gorsuch. They say if the president’s nominee cannot get the support of 60 U.S. senators, the White House should withdraw his nomination in favor of someone who can secure the support of a supermajority of senators. But it was always going to be an uphill effort, and Gorsuch is expected to be easily confirmed Friday by the Senate.
Devin Nunes Temporarily Recuses Himself From Russia Investigation
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
Representative Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, announced Thursday he would temporarily recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. Nunes said in a statement it was “in the best interests” of his committee and Congress for him to temporarily step aside, adding: “I will continue to fulfill all my other responsibilities as Committee Chairman, and I am requesting to speak to the Ethics Committee at the earliest possible opportunity in order to expedite the dismissal of these false claims” filed by left-leaning organizations. Nunes has faced mounting pressure to step down from the investigation after it was revealed last month he visited the White House before and after announcing he had significant information to support President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims his transition team was surveilled by the intelligence community. That resulted in allegations from Democrats he was too eager to do Trump’s bidding, especially after it was revealed the information was given to him by White House officials. Nunes said the investigation will be taken over by Republican Representative Michael Conaway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney. As my colleague Russell Berman notes, though Speaker Paul Ryan reiterated his support for Nunes in a press conference following the announcement, “the chairman’s sudden move to quit the Russia probe raises questions about whether he misled the speaker about his handling of evidence that he viewed at the White House.”
North Korea Looms Over Meeting Between Trump, China's Xi
(Joe Skipper / Reuters)
President Trump has called China a currency manipulator, he has criticized it on trade, and for, in his view, not doing enough to curtail North Korea’s activities. But while those issues loom over the meeting today between Trump and Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida, the two leaders are likely to discuss the one area where there could be a deal of some sort: North Korea. Their meeting comes a day after North Korea launched a ballistic missile off the coast of the Korean peninsula, the latest of several such tests the North has carried out in recent months. Last month U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ruled out talks with the North until it renounces its nuclear-weapons program, adding that when it came to the North, the U.S. kept all options on the table. The New York Timesnotes that Trump, behind closed doors, “intends to aggressively press his counterpart to more effectively use China’s economic leverage on North Korea to restrain its rogue leader, Kim Jong-un, from developing nuclear weapons.” Meanwhile, their discussions on trade could focus on the U.S. trade deficit with China, which stands at about $300 billion annually.
Last month, California, Arizona, and Nevada agreed to conserve 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water—about a trillion gallons—through 2026 in order to protect their drinking supply. The agreement will likely cause big changes for one especially thirsty user: hay. So-called forage crops such as alfalfa and Bermuda grass, which are used to feed livestock, require large amounts of water to cultivate. For the next three years, the states agreed to pay cities, irrigation districts, and Native American tribes $1.2 billion to use less water, including paying many farmers not to farm.
Agriculture accounts for almost 80 percent of the water consumed in the Colorado River Basin each year, and alfalfa is responsible for more than a third of that drain.
The federal indictment of Donald Trump depicts a man who knew that what he was doing was wrong and went to great lengths to cover it up.
We knew it would be bad. Even so, it’s bracing just how bad the evidence laid out by the Justice Department against Donald Trump is.
The indictment against Trump and his personal valet, Walt Nauta, unsealed this afternoon, lays out the federal case against the former president in vivid, shocking, and sometimes even wry detail. An indictment is not a conviction—it’s a set of allegations by prosecutors, without rebuttal from the defendant. Trump is innocent in court until proven guilty, and has loudly and insistently proclaimed that he is an innocent man. But the evidence included shows why the case against Trump is so disturbing, and why it will be tough for him to defend. And the crimes it details are among the stupidest imaginable.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.
“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”
“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”
Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?
CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?
Updated at 11:34 a.m. ET on June 7, 2023.
“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.”
It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.
“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said.
The special counsel’s indictment offers party leaders their best escape from the loyalty trap yet—if they choose to take it.
It’s as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral.
Who believes that Governor Ron DeSantis—so badly trailing in the polls behind former President Donald Trump—is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy—so disgusted by Trump in private—does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice?
The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis. Now they have a turn of events that promises both to help their corporate political agenda and to stoke controversy and ratings. They must be positively ecstatic at the network’s New York headquarters today.
So many in the Republican and conservative world wish Trump off the stage. So few possess the courage or integrity to say so aloud.
Republicans are trying to gaslight America about the former president’s astounding recklessness.
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Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his aides, has been indicted for federal crimes involving highly sensitive national-security documents. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security.
Defiant Recklessness
Special Counsel Jack Smith has successfully petitioned to unseal the indictment of Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta on multiple charges revolving around Trump’s removal of classified material from the White House and his belligerent refusal to return them. The charges include making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing records, and willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.
The 2,000-year-old man turns 97 this summer. I talked with him about fighting in World War II, his life in comedy, and the secret to happiness.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
I’m always looking for a way to get near Mel Brooks. Can you blame me? He has acted in, directed, produced, and written some of the most memorable films in human history—among them The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and Spaceballs. He is the reason I went into comedy. As a young man, I obsessively watched his films and his appearances on late-night television. I would listen to his 2000 Year Old Man albums—in which Mel played the character of an ancient man explaining the origins of humanity—and dream of having the same job as him.
The final season of Netflix’s sparkly teen comedy acknowledges that transitioning to higher education isn’t always an easy or automatic process.
In the previous season of Netflix’s sparkly teen comedy Never Have I Ever, Sherman Oaks High’s resident heartthrob, Paxton Hall-Yoshida (played by Darren Barnet), gave a poignant speech at his graduation about persistence. “Push yourself out there,” he told his classmates. “Defy other people’s expectations of you, and don’t ever let a label define you.”
However, at the start of the show’s fourth and final season (which began streaming this week), Paxton appears to have forgotten his own advice. Two episodes in—and after only two weeks spent attending college—he has dropped out and returned to his alma mater, where he has immediately taken a job as the assistant swim coach. The development initially felt like a contrived device to keep a character who had graduated high school in the mix. Paxton had been the object of affection for the series’ protagonist, Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), since the pilot; I assumed that the show sought to retain him as a love interest.
The former president has a diabolical genius for selling his supporters on an alternative version of reality.
In the weeks before he took office as president, Donald Trump had a portentous, private chat with the broadcast journalist Lesley Stahl, a prelude to a 60 Minutes interview. As Stahl recounted later, she asked Trump why he so relentlessly brutalized the media. His answer, she said, was strikingly direct: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”
This is, of course, the thinking of an authoritarian. If you can successfully cast doubt on facts and the people whose mission it is to report them, you have tremendous latitude to set your own narrative and do as you please. Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions—not just the media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.
We’re living in an age of “period positivity.” That’s not enough.
For three months this year, I bled nearly every day. My doctor doesn’t know why. Google doesn’t know why. The condition is simply called “postmenopausal bleeding,” and medicine’s best guess as to the cause is that the postmenopausal hormone-replacement therapy I started last November suddenly made my endometrium, the lining of the uterus, “unstable.” All scientific knowledge added up to “If it’s still happening in six months, get back in touch.” (I’m still bleeding intermittently, and I don’t know why.) This is the kind of massive medical shrug that anyone with female anatomy has probably encountered.
Despite major advances for women over the past 100 years—the invention of the contraceptive pill, greater access to safe abortions—much of female biology is still woefully underserved by science. There are reasons for this, most notably the historical exclusion of women from medical and pharmaceutical trials, partly because our awkward hormone cycles were thought to skew results. There’s also the fact that some scientists still project findings from research on men onto women, seeming not to realize that women aren’t just small men: Women are different down to the cellular level, meaning that many of our immune responses, experiences of pain, and symptoms (including, for instance, those that accompany a heart attack) may be different from men’s. Are you having a nasty, unexpected side effect from your medication? That could be because most drugs were developed with male bodies in mind. A 2020 review of 86 common medications, including antidepressants, cardiovascular drugs, and painkillers, found that women were likely routinely overmedicated and suffered adverse reactions nearly twice as often as men.
